The Great Airline Conspiracy

This commentary was written by CBSNews.com's Dick Meyer.

I'm walking into this danger eyes wide open, so I'm not asking for pity. But the fact remains, I will be in the crosshairs of a terrorist group calling itself "Delta Air Lines" when I board that flight to Salt Lake City this afternoon.

You may be in peril, too.

Delta is one of several nefarious outfits in a loose-knit cabal of shell companies purportedly engaged in transporting humans by air. These pseudo-capitalist front organizations never make money, so they must exist for some other reason, and that seems to be to perpetrate global psycho-torture intended to turn our species into sheep.

Other cells in this network go by names such as United, American, USAir and Continental. Beware of all of them.

Bad weather across the country today gives operations like Delta a rationale to trap large groups of people for extended, thoroughly random periods of time in their brainwashing vessels, usually called airplanes.

These airline front groups will trick people into paying them upfront for what they think will be air travel to places such as Orlando, Denver and Buffalo. After loading "passengers" onto the aircraft, they pull out onto a mysterious form of real estate called "tarmac," where a disembodied voice announces something like, "Air traffic control has put a ground hold on all traffic in the Central Northwest-Southeast corridor. We'll tell you as you soon we know more."

But they won't.

Then begins a period where you will be deprived of food and toilets. Any further information will be doublespeak. Low-oxygen air will be pumped into the chamber that will also drain moisture from your system, making you susceptible to subliminal messaging and erratic behavior.

Often the person sitting next to you will be an undercover operative who will further attempt to destabilize you with relentless chatter about trends in orthopedic footwear sales or by emitting strange odors and guttural noises. Deprived of all of your own comforts that exceed three fluid ounces, you will also face the threat that your luggage will be sent to a random location.

When this legally sanctioned hostage-taking finally ends, you will experience transient relief and then lingering feelings of anger and helplessness. Your unconscious and deep cognitive functions will be subtly altered so that you will eventually be unable to generate feelings that you deserve to be treated fairly, honestly, courteously or even legally in commercial transactions. And eventually we'll all be robots.

Call me eccentric, but that's how I see the modern airline industry.

Some of their common practices can only be explained by this conspiracy theory — like "overbooking." How often have you been on the verge of takeoff when a disembodied says, "We are in an oversold status and we need volunteers to take a later fight"?

How can it be legal to sell 150 tickets on an airplane that has 135 seats? Imagine buying expensive tickets to a football game and getting to the stadium only to have an usher say they're "in an oversold status" but how would you like two tickets to a Monster Truck rally next Thursday, with complimentary Diet Pepsi? Absurd. This is premeditated psycho-torture, obviously.

Same with the insidious frequent flyer programs. The allure is that you get something free the more you fly. In reality, you have to go through more hoops than Sea World porpoises to get these alleged rewards. Phone holds, blackout periods and limited seating are just some of the obstacles.

Other businesses don't do this. Lots of coffee places have little cards they punch for their regulars that give them a free cup after 10 or 20 paid cups. If the airlines had their way, you'd get a free cup all right, but only a small decaf Hazelnut between 11:15 a.m. and 1:45 p.m. on Saturdays, when you don't actually work.

So the intricate will-breaking techniques developed by the "airlines" aren't used solely in tarmac-hostage situations. Depriving passengers of stress-reducing information at the gate during delays is another common technique.

In-flight food deprivation is another ubiquitous trick. And here is the newest one: random fares. The cost of buying a ticket from, say, Baltimore to St. Louis will vary wildly depending on the day and even time you check the fare. And the Internet will give you one price, Expedia another and a phone agent in Bangalore a third. This was a common disorientation and disinformation technique pioneered by the East Germans in the 1950s.

Occasionally there are "we're mad as hell and we're not going to take it anymore" moments that get folks riled up. There is one right now, nobly fostered by a woman named Kate Hanni who was held hostage by "American Airlines" for about 10 hours recently. She has started yet another push for a Passenger's Bill of Rights and has a blog promoting it. Check it out, sign her petition and do whatever they say.

But have no illusions: the United States government is in on this plot. Why else would the government supply an inadequate number of air traffic controllers, inferior technology and too few facilities over a period of two decades?

Why else would the government allow an industry vital to commerce and national security, that has potential to be dangerous, to shrink from 361,000 full-time employees in 2002 to 263,000 employees in 2006 even though passenger traffic is at record levels? Think about it.

These airlines disguise themselves as publicly-traded corporations but they do not respond to normal economic incentives and rules. They always lose money. So boycotts, markets and invisible hands are useless.

So, earthlings, resistance is futile. Please fasten your seatbelts, discontinue any use of all electronic devices, return your tray tables and seats to their upright positions, baa like a sheep and don't talk back to your captors. And please fly with us again.

If there's no column next week, you'll know what happened.

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By Dick Meyer